Netanyahu’s consciousness-raising

The Netanyahu speech to Congress continues to deliver rewards to the American people. It is hard to think of a greater moment for raising consciousness on the conflict and its roots. The speech has exposed important issues in ways that no one would have imagined just a year ago. Our media are talking openly about the takeover of our foreign policy by Israel, the loyalty of politicians to Israel, the paranoid thinking of the Israeli right and the neoconservatives, and the injustices of the occupation.

Here’s a wrapup.

First, the historic Iranian talks keep going. The Orient Advisory Group says that the P5+1 and Iran are very close to a deal. Netanyahu’s trip only accelerated the process:

The intensity of the [John] Kerry-[Javad] Zarif interaction in Geneva over the past weeks has been driven, in part, by the commitment to preempt the impact of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled March 3, 2015 address to a joint session of the US Congress, where he is expected to rally opposition to any P5+1 deal that allows Iran to maintain any active enrichment capacity.

The neoconservatives and ultra-Zionists are more and more exposed. The Anti Defamation League takes Israel’s side over the U.S. position in its statement supporting Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. From Abe Foxman and Barry Curtiss-Lusher

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s passionate and determined address made clear to Members of Congress, the American people, and the international community that an agreement that leaves intact a path for Iran to achieve its ambitions for nuclear weapons is not sufficient.

One of the most significant elements of the speech was the message sent to Iran, both by Prime Minister Netanyahu and by the support he received from Members of Congress, that there are serious and legitimate concerns about the direction of the negotiations and that the Iranian regime should not assume it will get its way.

M.J. Rosenberg says that the speech and the Israel lobby’s drumbeat for more sanctions on Iran have made the issue of dual loyalty a legitimate question:

Netanyahu & AIPAC have made it legitimate to ask pro-Israel Jews: who are you loyal to? That is the question they ask.

AIPAC is, by definition, an organized based on dual loyalty: supporting Israeli policy and leaders over America’s.

I have long held Rosenberg’s view here (and John Judis’s). Which is not to say that there are not over-the-top conspiracy theories about the Israel lobby around the world. In Iran, the press is marveling at the fact that the lobby’s power has limits. Haleh Esfandiari of the Wilson Center in the Wall Street Journal:

Meanwhile, Iranian media and the public have been fascinated that the U.S. president pointedly did not meet with the Israeli prime minister, that the U.S. vice president was away during Mr. Netanyahu’s visit, and that the U.S. secretary of state was in Montreux, Switzerland, negotiating a “bad deal” with the “enemy” just as Israel’s prime minister addressed Congress. Until recently Iranians had been convinced that the Israeli lobby runs the U.S. government (an assertion that my interrogators made repeatedly when I was held in Evin Prison in 2007).

Political commentator Ali Mottahar-Nia argued in the newspaper Iran that Mr. Netanyahu went to Congress because his warnings had failed to persuade Western officials and “all his arrows aimed at wrecking a deal have gone awry.”

The great thing about Netanyahu’s speech is that the American people are waking up to this view of the lobby. Leon Wofsy at Portside says that Netanyahu’s desperate appeal reflects the fact that his country is getting internationally isolated for the persecution of Palestinians, that Netanyahu is aware that even US politicians are having misgivings about the alignment of the US and Israel, even while they give him standing ovations:

What makes [Netanyahu] desperate is the threat that serious diplomacy poses to the policies and ambitions of Israel’s extremist right wing government. The Iran negotiations reveal a fissure between strategic interests of the United States and those of Israel’s occupiers and expansionists. While virtually every politician in America swears undying loyalty to Israel, and the armaments and money flow unabated, there is considerable unease about constraining US policy according to the desires of an increasingly ostracized Israeli government.

Incredibly, Netanyahu never mentioned the “Palestinian problem”, but it was surely in his calculations. The process of real negotiations, especially involving a wide diversity of governments, runs completely counter to the formulas that have sustained and expanded the occupation. Either Israel could rely on the United States, its partner and chosen “mediator”, or it could defy even the US negotiators by expanding settlements, building walls, or countering resistance with indiscriminate military force.

Now the rest of the world is beginning to play a significant part. Condemnation of apartheid, boycotts, support for a Palestinian State cannot be dismissed. Despite Netanyahu’s loud declarations in the name of “all Jews”, many Jews in the United States and Israel are angered by his distortion of “Never Again” into a justification for oppression and violence against others.

What about Netanyahu’s Congressional audience, those who cheered him wildly and are ready, at his bidding, to do their utmost to undercut Obama and doom the negotiations?

Some may know not where the road leads; other Democrats may be offended, but are too intimidated to protest. But here is the real menace: the spectacle that Boehner sponsored was nothing less than the gathering of a war party that seeks full control of US foreign and military policy.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship at Truthout have a hardhitting piece on Sheldon Adelson, saying the ultra-Zionist’s money is behind Netanyahu’s effort to “usurp American foreign policy.” They also say that the US Congress is “under the thumb of a foreign power.” More evidence that the lobby overplayed its hand. The cat is out of the bag on the tail-wags-the-dog theme.

So Netanyahu gets the best of both of Adelson’s worlds – his powerful propaganda machine in Israel [Adelson owns rightwing newspapers in Israel] and his campaign cash here in the United States. Combined, they allow Netanyahu to usurp American foreign policy as he manipulates an obliging US Congress enamored of Adelson’s millions, pushing it further to the right on Israel and the Middle East.

Not only is this casino mogul the unofficial head of the Republican Party in America (“he with the gold rules”), he is the uncrowned King of Israel — David with a printing press and checkbook instead of a slingshot and a stone. All of this came to the fore in Netanyahu’s speech on Tuesday: the US cannot determine its own policy in the Middle East and the majority in Congress are under the thumb of a foreign power.

Jim Fallows is doing a smashing job at the Atlantic to counter Netanyahu’s hysteria. That word appears regularly in the views of the speech that he is posting. His latest quotes an unnamed historian:

History offers up a depressingly vast number of small states perceiving danger from larger, well-armed, unpredictable neighbors. It provides at least that many examples of threats to continued Jewish existence in a given region. The constant reiteration of this particular event [the Nazi-era Holocaust] achieves little more than dumbing down the discourse: it’s the historical equivalent of hollering.

To paraphrase Levi-Strauss, the Holocaust is not particularly good to think with. Its extremity serves as a bludgeon. Its use is nearly always intended to cut off debate or critique, to seize the moral high ground, and ideally to incite panic. I don’t know the best response to the Iranian threat, which I take seriously. But I suspect hysteria is unhelpful—and if that’s true, so is raising the specter of the Holocaust, as Netanyahu does every time he discusses this topic.

Ask your average historian whether the past repeats itself. She’ll tell you it doesn’t — only that it sometimes rhymes.

No doubt everyone would have preferred Netanyahu’s speech to be given by the commander in chief of the world’s superpower rather than by the leader of the Jewish state, if only because sooner or later American strength will be required to defeat the new super-threats. Even England could not defeat Nazism on its own…

A more familiar historical parallel than the one with ancient Persia is the one Netanyahu drew between radical Islam and radical Nazism that likewise targeted the Jews as warmup for the conquest of Europe. Depending on their points of view, commentators on the current scene invoke Chamberlain at Munich as an augury of appeasement or Churchill before Congress after Pearl Harbor.

Wisse offers this formulation about the relationship of Jews to the broader society:

Netanyahu could not replace Barack Obama as leader of the free world. Unlike supermen in comic books or superheroes of animated film, he cannot protect America. But what Bibi could do, and did do, was to identify the dangers that the president and his followers have tried to obscure. Because of the cruelty directed against them in particular, Jews protect the world best when they best protect themselves

I believe Wisse’s understanding of human community is deluded. Her definition of civilization seems to come down to: the Jews and people who support the Jews against other people. She is living in 1938 (to cite both Fallows’s understanding, and the late Tony Judt). My piece on the Jewish condition has gotten a wide readership because it expressed sympathy for this Jewish understanding of history but said that it is anachronistic. Wisse is placing Iranians and Palestinians outside the boundaries of human community. In a global age, we have to have more evolved ideas of community.

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Wisse: “Because of the cruelty directed against them in particular, Jews protect the world best when they best protect themselves.” WOW!

Wisse is manifoldly and manifestly deluded: she does it either from an ideologically-based or self-serving blindness like a famous auto maker (“What’s good for General Motors is good for America”). Ruth, dear, what’s good for (right-wing?) Israel is not necessarily good for America.

What are her delusions? Jews don’t seek to protect the world and also don’t do it by accident. What threatens the Jews (or Israel) does not necessarily threaten anyone else. Iran does not threaten even Israel much less “the Jews”. And the whole Bibi thang seems to have had as one purpose to make America continue to ignore unmentioned — Israel’s threats and attacks against Palestine, Syria, Lebanon.

As to MJR and “dual” loyalty (“AIPAC is, by definition, an organized [sic] based on dual loyalty: supporting Israeli policy and leaders over America’s. “). Just so you know, MJR, yours is not a characterization of “dual” loyalty, but of a “single” loyalty, loyalty to Israel and disloyalty betimes to USA. My assumption is that loyalty to two sides in a conflict cannot be dual. Sympathy can be dual, but not loyalty. Loyalty demands that you take sides.

That said, many folks do not support all an American president proposes. I did not support Bush’s call for wars, nor do I support Obama’s wars, NSA’s spying, FBI “anti-terror” stings on mentally insufficient Muslim youth, nor Obama’s (or USA’s) sanctions on Cuba or Iran. (In my view, neither Cuba nor Iran has done anything wrong or dangerous to USA.) I do not regard myself as disloyal for opposing so much that USA does.

I do find un-reasoned (knee-jerk, ideological) support for another country (Israel) a sort of “loyalty” to a foreign state. If Israel were regarded as an enemy state, it might occasion treason. As it is, and because it is un-reasoned, it is a sort of disloyalty to humankind. But until we have thought-police, people are entitled to [well-reasoned as well as unreasoned] political opinion.

Netanyahu could not replace Barack Obama as leader of the free world. Unlike supermen in comic books or superheroes of animated film, he cannot protect America. But what Bibi could do, and did do, was to identify the dangers that the president and his followers have tried to obscure. Because of the cruelty directed against them in particular, Jews protect the world best when they best protect themselves

1. Bibi is not a superhero and he cannot protect America – BUT – Jews must be superheroes because they protect the world. So, either Bibi is not Jewish or he can, in fact, protect America.

2. When Jews fail to protect themselves, they fail to protect the world. Should she really place that burden on Jews?

3. When Jews fail to protect the Palestinians, they are not doing their best to protect the world, which means they are not doing their best to protect themselves. Does this make Jews anti-Semitic or self-loathing?

“When Jews fail to protect the Palestinians, they are not doing their best to protect the world.”

Bulls eye on the hypocrisy. Israelis and their supporters clearly have zero interest in protecting the Palestinians. It follows they have no interest in protecting any non-Jews in the world. This looks a lot like the attitude of many Israelis that Palestinians are “sub-human”, “beasts”, “grasshoppers”, and “grass” to be mowed. Very nice little ladies in the American South have been equally submersed in the delusion of bigotry and self-superiority.

Menendez worked up the ranks from a Trenton Gau Leiter. He was John Corzine’s hand picked successor. New Jersey politics operates under its own rules.

Menendez is not a bright bulb and not respected in the Senate. He will fight this and find little support. As more sludge leaks during the discovery phase, AIPAC’s boy, Menendez will be toxic. Nobody, not even AIPAC or readers of Breitbart will want to be associated with Menendez. But AIPAC will also be stained, and this time it might not wear off.

as if the US has such a great track record ‘negotiating’ nuclear treaties. Just ask the South Koreans.

” Wendy Sherman negotiated the US’s nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal.

Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs.

Sherman is now the US’s chief negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran.”

@ DaBakr “Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs”

DABAKR- “Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs.”

North Korea and the US had negotiated certain agreements which the US then proceeded to actively sabotage. Then North Korea resumed its nuclear program, its main deterrent to a hostile empire intent upon global hegemony. Chomsky explains:

“In September 2005, under pressure, the United States did agree to negotiations, and there was an outcome. September 2005, North Korea agreed to abandon — quoting — “all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs” and to allow international inspection. That would be in return for international aid, mainly from the United States, and a non-aggression pledge from the US and an agreement that the two sides — I’m quoting — would “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations.”

Well, the United States, the Bush administration, had an instant reaction. It instantly renewed the threat of force. It froze North Korean funds in foreign banks. It disbanded the consortium that was supposed meet to provide North Korea with a light-water reactor. So North Korea returned to its weapons and missile development, carried out a weapons test, and confrontation escalated. Well, again, under international pressure and with its foreign policy collapsing, Washington returned to negotiations. That led to an agreement, which Washington is now scuttling.” (Noam Chomsky)http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20080226.htm

PHIL- “Jim Fallows is doing a smashing job at the Atlantic to counter Netanyahu’s hysteria.”

Jim Fallows: “I don’t know the best response to the Iranian threat, which I take seriously.”

“Smashing job”? For cry sakes, Phil, this is nothing but liberal propaganda. Serious threat? The only threat Iran poses is to US/Israel hegemony. How about a nuclear weapons free Middle East which Iran supports and the US and Israel oppose? How about the US take meaningful steps to eliminate nuclear weapons as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty rather than the planned upgrading of the US nuclear arsenal? Let us be honest, the primary threat for using nuclear weapons resides in the US with Israel close behind.

Thanks for this interesting and useful survey of commentaries and the shifts in the debate. I’m extremely glad your piece on Netanyahu’s speech and the American Jewish condition has received a wide readership. I’m sure it has helped the truth gather momentum. And once the truth is out, it’s hard to cover it up again.

Poor Joe Scarborough is having a tough time. He’s having to talk louder and louder to drown out the facts and intimidate his guests. Lying for Israel just isn’t as easy as it used to be. One day Joe will be saying, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that Israel has been lying all these years, slaughtering Muslims and stealing their lands!”

Ah, Ruth Wisse, author of one of the most contemptibly racist remarks ever uttered: “Palestinian Arabs [are] people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.” Yes, Ruth, they actually have children, bleed when you bomb them, and complain about being bombed. Would she have later obtained her Harvard faculty position had she described Jews as people who bleed others dry, choke on zyclon b, then open a Holocaust museum in every corner of the globe? Still, I have to grudgingly admit that her prose is more impressive from a rhetorical standpoint than mine.

Ruth Wisse might profitably expand her horizons to include these breeders and bleeders, for Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? I doubt if she will. I have heard the gist of her remarks echoed over and over from Israelis. So it is remarkable that so many Israelis and other Jews are beginning to recognize them for their obscenity, and to campaign for peace and justice against such a widely held and fiercely defended position. It gives me some hope…

Again, Wisse: “Wisse: “Because of the cruelty directed against them in particular, Jews protect the world best when they best protect themselves.”

And all the time I heard people (Jews, nu?) saying of some proposed course of action, gotta be good for somebody, right?, “But is it good for the Jews?” Is this (some) Jews protecting the world, or is it (some) Jews looking out for themselves? Is Adelson (or any Koch ) saying, “I;m doing this for their own good”? No, very, very rich guys (be they Jews or not) are looking after themselves, personally, family, class, or tribe. It’s us against them, guys.

What Wisse seems really to be saying is: “Forgive us, everybody else, forgive us, Palestinians, we had to do what’s best for the Jews.” And we’ll twist your arm as far as it needs to be twisted to get you to help us do it.

No doubt everyone would have preferred Netanyahu’s speech to be given by the commander in chief of the world’s superpower rather than by the leader of the Jewish state

The President of the USA is Head of State AND Head of Government, AND Commander-In-Chief.

The Prime Minister of Israel is Head of Government. That’s it, and it’s a coalition at that.

The US Military isn’t buying it, and that’s a greater grassroots reach than anything the 535 in Congress have access to.

On Feb 2, ‘connected’ military mouthpiece Mark Perry wrote in Al-Jazeera America, Netanyahu’s Congress invitation raises eyebrows among some US generals
Analysis: Top brass who have questioned Obama’s strategies don’t want a foreign leader influencing US decision-making.

[A] senior Joint Chiefs of Staff officer who regularly briefs the U.S. high command was willing to speak bluntly in exchange for anonymity. “There’s always been a lot of support for Israel in the military,” the officer said, “but that’s significantly eroded over the last few years. This caps it. It’s one thing for Americans to criticize their president and another entirely for a foreign leader to do it. Netanyahu doesn’t get it. We’re not going to side with him against the commander in chief. Not ever.”

Colonel Pat Lang (Ret.) was plainer in his plea: Write to your members of Congress! Stop Bibi!

This man is in the United States for the specific purpose of wrenching control of US foreign policy from the hands of our elected president and the Executive Branch of the federal government.

He does not shrink from saying that this attempt is all about his country and what he imagines are its interests and that he does not care if the interests of our country are damaged by his efforts. […]

raising consciousness on the conflict and its roots this article opens. And Our media are talking openly . Then, the selected opinions here are those from the Zionist and/or Jews subset mainly or only. Nothing relevant happening outside of this area?

One more word about MJ Rosenberg who is quoted once again. I don’t need opinions from anyone who does accuse anyone of anti-Semitism without backing that up. He may have coined the term “Israel firster”. The shortcut is very to the point indeed, compared to the lengthy circumventing verbose descriptions we otherwise need. But not even Rosenberg himself uses this these months.

Then, the M.J. Rosenberg twitter headmast says: I absolutely believe there must be a Jewish State in Palestine, but within ’67 lines, with Jerusalem shared. No Jewish settlements in West Bank. Free Gaza.

This is gratuitous. He never had to pay one dime of a shekel for this position. The second problem with this is, that he does not clarify how a Jewish state will be democratic, nor how it would be righteous. A racist constitution for a state, MJ? No Right of Return, MJ? Compensation for stolen and demolished goods? Liberal Zionism is what it is: Zionism, undemocratic and unequal.

Sycamores: How MJR’d feel is this: he’d feel that he might wish to move to Israel where he’d feel soooooo at home among militarist-as-a-society surrounded-by-enemies racist Jews and be damned glad that that Israel had had the foresight never to allow “return” to the Palestinian exiles of ’48. Unless, of course, they went all soft-and-democratic-and-touchy-feely-antidiscriminatory on him and welcomed the exiles home and also made Israel into a democracy (like the USA would be if we coukld only get rid of all of our own racisms, classisms, etc.)

“I absolutely believe there must be a Jewish State in Palestine, but within ’67 lines”

Oh, the ’67 lines (“Lines”?) Because, let me see, Israel won it fair and square and territory acquired through war is the inviolable spoils of the victor? Nah, MJ’s gotta have something better than that. He’s much smarter than me.

That allows for Israeli settlements. For Israelis only. You know, Jewish State settlements, where Israel decides on permits. All will be covered in their Jewish State Constitution, maintained by the Jewish State High Courts. Boy MJ’s smart. A smart liberal Zionist.

It has never been clear to me why the USA and other club-members work so hard to prevent new members to the nuclear-club AND THEN simply shrug (except perhaps for N Korea) (at India and Pakistan,, the latter not perhaps a model of stability) and we hear no more about it!

It seems to me that there is no danger in a nuclear-armed country opposed by others, because neither would dare to use the damn things: war, if at all, would be “conventional” — you know, white phosphorus, cluster bombs, DU, DIME, high-explosives, etc., and rockets from drones and (perhaps, still, fighter jets). I don’t even fear Israel’s nukes, not even with Liberman at the helm. as it might be. UNLESS — they be used before Iran has a retaliatory force. That’d be scarey.

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